ALL THINGS BIG AND SMALL 2.0

To all the ardent Creationists and Theists who keep writing to me re the posts on 'God' on this Blog. Thanks, but no thanks. I respect your need for religion but there are many like me who don't need it. So leave us alone. Here is a re-post from my Facebook: LIFE IS A CLASS 4 CELLULAR AUTOMATA To the Creationists and Theists who inhabit my Facebook, I understand that Religion is ultimately a quantum leap of faith and it is suitable for some people. But I am impressed by my correspondence with a pastor in Georgia, USA-who did use Science to explore alternative views of the origin of the Universe and Life before taking that leap of faith. I applaud him for that though I disagree with his conclusion. He has read Richard Dawkin's many books, Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science, dabbled with Artificial Intelligence, and played with Cellular Automata such as Conway's Game Of Life (available as an iOS app). Cellular Automata are a simulation of Life played ou...

James Conway's Game Of Life Cellular Automata Stephen Wolframs book: Explaining Life and The Universe with Cellular Automata CLASSICAL http://tones.wolfram.com/id/GRhb3ApzQdwx506wmTMUrhOTtUMNfrnSZgc8JwknCQU HIP HOP http://tones.wolfram.com/id/G1wrGZLZJWIQTDtqI0kUutecFHgjfYgb8NTS1QfeJfwzYj3c JAZZ http://tones.wolfram.com/id/G0Cos4WxMCF1vplzXkauryTRmLuXjCqFnIhMIWM4t4HDkv LATIN http://tones.wolfram.com/id/GRkNlkOzyU33xXTzGtS4oiLxB2hqmjxY4GTSRat2nLJs9RJM Note# If there is no sound when you click on the link and it's Play button, go to Download and email the Midi file to yourself as an attachment, then play it separately on your computer. If you read Stephen Hawking's (and Leonard Mlodinow) latest book " The Grand Design", -New Answers To The Ultimate Questions Of Life [Bantam Press, 2010], in the last Chapter, he uses the example of Cellular Automata to explain how and why Life in this Universe could have come about-without the requirement for a God. It is an at...

1. Artificial Life Forms generated by a computer program 2. Tom Ray's Tierra Artificial Life and World -less graphical but no less revealing 3. Conway's Game of Life-cellular automata, Life created on a Grid A ONE-PAGE DEFINITION OF LIFE Prologue Until a few decades ago, most people thought they knew what it meant to say that something was alive. Breathing, eating, the ability to reproduce, having a shape, existing in a time-space dimension etc were some of the characteristics which defined Life. Until the advent of computers and programmers who wrote code that could also perform most of the things which living things do. And that has led people [like me] to re-evaluate the meaning of saying that you are a living thing. It was John von Neumann, who first thought of self-reproducing cellular automata, and inspired John Conway, Chris Langton, Tom Ray, and Stephen Wolfram, John Holland and countless others to institute the study and creation of entities that exhibited life-like be...